


filled crown to toe of direst cruelty, yet i return a new man

by deathrae



Series: i've been through hell but i'm still standing [2]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, exploration of trauma, sssssortof, unapologetic fluff, wayfinder ot3 if you squint REAL hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-17 17:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4675949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathrae/pseuds/deathrae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because sometimes teenagers go into hell and come back changed and there are marks left inside where no one can see.</p>
<p>And sometimes the only thing that makes you clean is love from someone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Terra started taking a lot more baths than he used to.

At first it was innocuous enough. Showers every night, where before getting him to shower after every practice meant Eraqus practically had to barricade Terra in the bathroom with a string of spells too powerful for Terra to counter. The new kids didn’t know it was odd for him, but Ven had snickered a little whenever he left the dinner table sort of quickly and Aqua had used frustratingly large words like “fastidious” that he had to look up afterward, but it was harmless. _They_ were harmless.

But it didn’t feel like enough.

He stood under the water every night, letting it pound on his skin, and he knew the day’s grit and sweat and work was washing off him but something else wasn’t. Something a little deeper than his skin.

He started showering in the morning, too. Maybe he just needed to wash up more often. Maybe that would help.

It didn’t.

Ven never noticed the new addition to his routine. Aqua barely counted as a living being before a cup of coffee, so he didn’t think she would ever catch him either.

When the "shower twice" plan failed, he searched the castle. He stole harsh, stringent soaps from Eraqus’ old rooms and...er, _borrowed_ rougher, special cloths from under Aqua’s sink, and he scrubbed until his whole body was sore and the water, long since gone cold, ate into his skin.

It still wasn’t enough.

Aqua did notice, however, when he didn’t show up at the yard after lunch, even though they had agreed to train. He heard her calling out for Ventus through the cracked-open window above his head, heard her asking _has anyone seen Terra?_ He slid a little deeper into the tub of scalding water and glanced over at his wayfinder sitting and glowing a soft, warm orange against his shirt, folded haphazardly on top of his pants.

It occurred to him to scramble out, get dressed, play it off.

He discarded the idea and instead scrubbed at his arm again, wincing as the water burned his raw skin.

**_Tap tap tap tap_** , past the bathroom door. _There’s Aqua_ , he thought. **_Tap tap tap, pause, turn, tap tap_**.

A soft knock on the door.

“Terra?”

“Yeah,” he said. "You found me."

There was a long pause and a deep breath that turned into a sigh.

“I wasn’t going to ask, Terra, but…”

“I know,” he said, interrupting. “I know it’s weird.”

She sighed, boot tapping on the floor. The faucet **_drip dripped_** into the water while she thought through her words.

“What’s wrong, Terra,” she said, the words coming out like a sigh, not a true question. She wasn’t asking so much as quietly pleading with him to explain, and he could feel it in her voice.

“I just...I feel…” He pursed his lips, ducked his mouth under the surface of the water for a moment, and now, now that he’d been _asked_ , the word came to mind like a slap to the face. He surfaced again with an audible splash.

“Slimy.”

There was a long stretch of new, less comfortable silence. “Slimy?” she said, echoing, and then he heard her trip over her own thoughts, heard the soft, sad noise that strangled in her throat, the way she always used to sound when she knew she’d put her foot in her mouth.

“Yeah,” he added lamely. “Slimy.”

“Inside or outside?” she asked.

He frowned, brow furrowing, and propped his elbows on the edges of the tub. “Inside, I guess.”

She was quiet for a while again, so quiet he thought maybe she’d snuck off, maybe someone had come to ask her something and she’d waved them away. He sank back into the water, dunking his head under. He hoped that wasn’t it. The last thing he needed was for Sora to start asking questions, or for Riku to give him that _look_ , that look like he knew way more than he was letting on, like he understood things Terra was thinking in a way that was unsettling, rather than comforting.

Aqua’s voice was softer now through the barrier of the water, warbling and surreal.

“I know of something that might help.”

He sat up and squinted his eyes shut as water slid over his face.

“What?”

“I...I think I know something that’ll help. Just… get outta there, okay? We’ll take a walk into the woods.”

He frowned, not sure how a forest was supposed to make him feel clean inside when no amount of scrubbing could get rid of that feeling of being stained and damaged and ruined inside. He slicked his hair back from his face with one hand, glanced toward the door.

“Mm…”

“Please, Terra?”

He made a face at his knees, forgetting for a moment she couldn’t see. “Yeah...okay. Just a minute.”

“Thanks.”

Her boots tap-tapped away and he sighed, pulled the stopper for the tub, and reached for a towel.

 

The air was cool, under the cover of the trees, and Aqua had, in rare form, swapped out parts of her armor for a proper jacket, her shorts for pants that hugged her legs too well for him not to notice. She was walking close, but not so close as to bump into him, and while there was still an air of tension to her, she’d been sleeping better and it showed. There was a little more of her old bounce in her walk.

When they’d gotten far enough in that they could only just see the castle if they turned and looked back down the road, she slowed a little, drifted just a little closer.

"You know… Maybe you should talk to Riku," she said.

He smirked, clicking his tongue against his teeth. "Don't be silly, Aqua. There's nothing I can teach him. He's my inheritor, and he still made master before I did."

She glanced over at him, then laughed. She laced her fingers into his and he almost tripped on a root in surprise.

"Exactly,” she said, pretending he had not just almost taken both of them down to the ground. “He is a master... and he's been through a lot to get there. I think...he understands what you're going through. It sounds like he's been through it before too."

Words jumped to his mouth that he bit down. How could anyone know what it was like to have your hands move without your permission, to look in the mirror and hate the dark, foreign version of your own face looking at you, to have all your words come out sickly sweet, cruel, and not your own? She tightened her grip on his hand as if she knew what he was thinking and he hesitated. He tried to remember what they’d been told… the hazy memories from his heart all coming back to one piece.

That look Riku gave him sometimes. Had he misjudged? He’d retained so little of what they were told at the beginning, still hazy and fuzzy at the edges.

"Huh,” he said, and Aqua bumped her shoulder into his as if it were a reward for coming around, rested a hand on the inside of his elbow. He winced at the pressure on his raw, scrubbed-too-clean skin and tried not to show her it hurt.

“Just give him a shot. He might surprise you.”

He sighed, shrugged a little, though not too much because that might disturb her perch on him, and he grit his teeth at the way her fingers rubbed. “Okay. I’ll talk to him.”

“Good.” She grinned then, slowed down a little more, and looked up at him. “But later.”

“Huh?” he asked, looking down at her. “Well, yeah, we’re sort of in the middle of a forest,” he said, gesturing around them.

“That was the idea, yeah,” she said, turning to back up off the road a little, tugging him along behind her, drawing him a few lengths away from the little dirt path they’d been walking.

“Aqua,” he said, slow, like it was a warning.

She grinned. “First I wanted to do something.”

His frown sharpened, brows drawing together on a skeptical sort of look. “What’s that.”

She backed up until her shoulders touched lightly against the trunk of a tree and slid her hands to rest on his shoulders, drawing him closer until he reached out to brace his hands on the tree to keep from falling against her.

“A lot of bad things happened,” she said, tilting her head back to rest against the tree. She shifted a little in between his arms, getting comfortable against the trunk. Her mouth was just a few inches from his and her breath was warm against his face. “But they’re past. We can move forward, now, if we want to. Me, and Ven, and you, too. We all made mistakes, but we did good things too, and we’ll do more good things, and we’ll make more mistakes... But right now what matters is, it’s just you in here. You’re free to make your own mistakes and do your own good things.”

He wasn’t sure that was quite the issue, but he listened, watched her face, watched the flick of her eyes and the slight color to her cheek like she knew full well it wasn’t her most motivating speech.

“What matters is,” she said, looking away until he threaded his fingers into her hair. “It’s your face, and your body.”

Almost on instinct, he looked inward, half-expecting to find the black weight of another person taking over his mind and his heart, but true to her words, there was no one. Inside him was no one but him, and he let his head drift forward, forehead touching hers, and sighed, eyes slipping closed. It was so quiet now, without the old man whispering in the empty corridors of his battered ribcage, so quiet without the sugary, oily voices of a heartless and a nobody laughing in the hollows of his mind, their voices overlapping in his ears.

Instead he could only hear her, the soft rasp of her voice against his face, washing over him like warmth and home, tucking around him like a blanket.

“And you get to choose what to do with it.”

_Hang on_.

“Aqua,” he said, drawing back from her again. All his thoughts flitted away from him, replaced by how there was just...the slightest odd tone in her voice, and what was supposed to be a confused smile got away from him and came out as a smirk instead. “Did you _really_ have me come all the way out here just to give me a pep-t–”

Her fingers curled into his hair and she yanked him down the last few inches to her, his mouth colliding with hers so hard that he jerked away from her and laughed, and that probably would’ve been awful except that she was holding a hand over her mouth and cursing under her breath and laughing too. He only barely noticed the leaves rustling over their heads.

“You okay?” he asked, wiping at his face with one hand, and he couldn’t say for sure if his eyes were wet from laughter or an overwhelming sense of joy.

“I bit my lip,” she grumbled, pressing her tongue to it and tapping it with a finger, satisfied when her finger didn’t come back red. She shook her head, still chuckling a little, and he ran his fingers through her hair and tucked it behind her ear. “Okay, I admit, I’ve had better ideas.”

“We’ll just chalk that up to one of our smaller mistakes then,” he said, grinning, and when she tilted her head back up to see him, looking almost offended, he leaned back in and pressed his lips to hers, gentler this time.

She jolted, then relaxed, her hands falling back to his shoulders and her fingers curling into his shirt. She was rough in all the right places and soft in the rest and he pressed closer to her until she was flat against the tree, sliding his hands under the jacket to rest on her waist. She hummed against his mouth and hooked an arm around his neck, the other sliding to tangle her fingers into his hair.

This time he did notice the rustling, and he would’ve ignored it except that the rustling was accompanied by a soft, awkward cough, and Aqua went tight and sharp under his hands. He rubbed circles into her sides with his thumbs to calm her down and looked up.

“Yeah?”

A shock of fluffy brown hair leaned over out of the branches, accompanied by Sora’s absolute most sheepish grin, and he ruffled the back of his hair with a hand. “Uh, hi...you guys, I... I wanted to leave, honest, but you were...gonna notice.”

Aqua looked up, tension replaced by embarrassment, and he kept up the circles, easing her nerves.

“What are you doing out here, Sora?”

“Uh...avoiding Kairi, because she said I’m supposed to scrub the kitchen...?”

Aqua opened her mouth, probably to send him back to the castle, but Terra leaned forward, kissed her again, and stepped away from the tree, pulling her along with him. “We’ll find another hiding spot, Sora, don’t worry,” he said, ignoring Aqua’s horrified squawk and the dark flush of red across her face, and Sora laughed and waved.

“Thanks. Have fun!”

Aqua looked about ready to murder him, but he laughed, kissed her lightly one more time, and then took off running deeper into the forest, not even waiting for her yelp, her grumbled frustration, and the inevitable **_tap tap tap_** of her boots as she ran after him.


	2. Epilogue: Chore-Dodgers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A further thought, for after Terra and Aqua get away...

For a long, terrifying moment, Sora sat, perched in the branches as he waited for Terra and Aqua to be out of earshot and out of sight.

“Phew,” he sighed, and settled against his branch. “That was close.” He rubbed a hand over his forehead. He was _sure_ Aqua was about to send him marching back up to the castle, and Kairi was gonna murder him for running off and avoiding her. Or at the very least, she was going to fry his eyebrows off with a surgical-precision Fire spell.

Thankfully, he was alone out here.

Or, he thought he was, until a husky, sleep-tired voice interrupted his quiet refuge in the forest.

“Hey Sora.”

It would be kinder to say that Sora jolted, and shouted in surprise.

In truth, Sora screamed like a small child, wheeled his arms, and nearly fell out of his tree.

Riku blinked at him from the next tree over, too groggy to appreciate the comedy of the moment.

“Are they gone?” Riku asked, yawning behind a hand.

“ _How long have you been there_ ,” Sora wheezed.

“Since you left the castle,” Riku said, snorting. “You think I was gonna stay there while Kairi went on a rampage to find _you?_ I’d have ended up in trouble without doing anything wrong!”

“Oh...”

“Don’t ‘oh’ me,” Riku said, and rolled his eyes. “Go find a different tree. I don’t want her to find us at the same time.”

“What! No, _you_ find a new tree! I got here first!”

“You did not.”

“Shut up, Riku!”


End file.
